From BreakingMuscle When I teach college courses, I am always the happiest when I find students who are chasing knowledge rather than chasing a grade. Many students’ questions relate to how they can do better on the test, rather than to improving their knowledge. I...

From Psychology Today We often see people with social anxiety who mold themselves to whomever they are speaking. For example, clients tell us how they try to be like what they think the other person likes (demand characteristics or a social desirability bias to more...

From PsychologyToday People with anxiety often perform “safety behaviors” during anxiety provoking situations. These safety behaviors make the person feel more comfortable in the situation by providing temporary relief from anxiety. However, safety...

From PsychologyToday Social Anxiety Disorderis usually characterized by a fear of negative evaluation. People with social anxiety are very worried about being judged negatively. This fear is the reason that people with social anxiety often avoid social situations....

Here is an excerpt of an article in the New Orleans paper Times-Picaune: Productive worrying Hurricanes may stress us out, but they can also spotlight our strengths Friday, September 12, 2008By Chris Bynum Stress. Tension. Anxiety. Why don’t we just call it what...

Here is an excerpt from John Tierney discussing experiments described in Dan Ariely’s new book, Predictably Irrational. In a series of experiments, hundreds of students could not bear to let their options vanish . . . .They played a computer game that paid real...

Here is an excerpt from PsyBlog discussing how perception is affected. Our lab is currently doing research on how fear can affect perception.Jessica K. Witt, an assistant professor at Purdue University, found that golfers who play well are more likely to actually see...

Here is an excerpt from an article describing an interview with Steven Pinker. Of note, is how Pinker paid attention to our deficits in affective forecasting (our ability to predict our future happiness) and forgot to pay attention to cognitive dissonance (how we tend...

Here is a portion of an entry written by Scott Adams on how people may have individual differences on the amount of cognitive dissonance that they can handle. Recently I saw the best case of cognitive dissonance I have ever seen. It was on Bill Maher’s show,...